When I first stepped behind the host lectern on the quiz show “Jeopardy!,” I was intimidated for two reasons. Most obviously, I had the hopeless task of filling the very large shoes of Alex Trebek, the legendary broadcaster and pitch-perfect host who’d been synonymous with the show since 1984.
But I was also keenly aware that the show was one of TV’s great institutions, almost a public trust. Since I was 10 years old, I’d watched Alex Trebek carve out a safe space for people to know things, where viewers get a steady diet of 61 accurate (and hopefully even interesting) facts every game. And I wondered: Even if “Jeopardy!” could survive the loss in 2020 of its peerless host, could it survive the conspiracy theories and fake news of our post-fact era?
Facts may seem faintly old-timey in the 21st century, remnants of the rote learning style that went out of fashion in classrooms (and that the internet search made obsolete) decades ago. But societies are built on facts, as we can see more clearly when institutions built on knowledge teeter. Inaccurate facts make for less informed decisions. Less informed decisions make for bad policy. Garbage in, garbage out.
I’ve always hated the fact that “trivia,” really our only word in English for general-knowledge facts and games, is the same word we use to mean “things of no importance.” So unfair! Etymologically, the word is linked to the trivium of medieval universities, the three fundamental courses of grammar, rhetoric and logic. And much of today’s so-called trivia still deals with subjects that are fundamentally academic.
Watch a game of “Jeopardy!” tonight, or head down to your local pub quiz, and you’re sure to be asked about scientific breakthroughs, milestones of history and masterpieces of art. Trivia, maybe — but far from trivial.
There might also be questions about pop lyrics and sports statistics, but even those are markers of cultural literacy, the kind of shared knowledge that used to tie society together: the proposition that factual questions could be answered correctly or not, that those answers matter, and that we largely agreed on the authorities and experts who could confirm them.
But trust in authority is not exactly at an all-time high, as you’ve probably heard. It’s been more than eight years since Kellyanne Conway’s coinage of the phrase “alternative facts” on “Meet the Press,” an Orwellian way to soft-pedal the outright falsehoods being told by powerful institutions. You don’t hear much about alternative facts anymore, but only because so many of them are no longer the alternative to anything. They have moved to the mainstream.
Scientific consensus in fields like climate change and vaccine efficacy is no longer the official position of American government. Ditto for legal facts (birthright citizenship), political facts (the winner of the 2020 election), and historical facts (too many examples to list). Inconvenient experts who push back can be removed by executive order; inconvenient books that disagree can be removed from libraries.
Technology is equally to blame for the erosion of fact. The remarkable new A.I. agents look and act so much like omniscient oracles that it’s easy to forget that they are sophisticated text predictors, about as reliable as the corpora they were trained on, and it’s just as easy to mistake their output for expertise. Human experts are not always right, but it would take a severe brain injury to make one confidently “hallucinate” invented information as factual, as the current generation of artificial intelligence is prone to do.
A recent A.I.-generated summer reading list, printed in The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Chicago Sun-Times, recommended 10 wholly imaginary books (by real authors!) before eventually throwing in a few you could actually find in a bookstore. The stakes may seem low when A.I. lies about a bibliography, but as users of Grok learned last month, it’s also alarmingly easy to manipulate chatbots into vouching for racist conspiracy theories like “white genocide,” if that’s what programmers want.
Trivia, of all things, is a ray of hope in our moment of national crisis. Somehow, it’s still an arena where ideological projects are completely ignored and the thing that matters — the only thing that matters — is the right answer. On “Jeopardy!” the clues are novel and varied and created every night by gifted human writers, never spun or fact-checked by A.I. The canon from which the questions are drawn is unapologetically evidence-based, the product of scholarly and scientific consensus. And yet the show is, I’m told, one of the last great media monoliths, regular viewing for millions of faithful viewers in red and blue states alike.
How do we understand the seeming anachronism of “Jeopardy!”? In a dark time, my secret optimism is that our viewers’ love for quiz games is a sign of what can eventually save us: a practical belief in fact and error that is more fundamentally American than the toxic blend of proud ignorance and smarter-than-thou skepticism that’s brought us to this point.
It stands to reason, then, that making government run more like a quiz show can only be a step in the right direction. Back in May, at a congressional hearing, Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire asked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to define habeas corpus, a bedrock common-law protection under fire from the administration.
Ms. Noem wasn’t even close. “Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country,” she answered.
“That’s incorrect,” noted Ms. Hassan, sounding as much like a quizmaster as a senator.
Later that week on “Jeopardy!,” a category called “Definitions of Legal Terms” happened to pop up in the first round. The game had been taped months in advance, so it was by sheer coincidence that one of the five clues concerned the definition of, yes, habeas corpus.
The “Jeopardy!” contestant, you’ll be relieved to hear, responded correctly.
Ken Jennings won 74 consecutive games of “Jeopardy!” and is the author of the forthcoming book “The Complete Kennections.”
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